@dassouki Computing/Memory constraint. How do I get around this? AFAIK, you would run out of RAM before you could parse the entire dataset and write it to your PostGIS(or other) database.
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Michael MarkietaJan 31 '12 at 18:35

Seems similar to the "geofabrik" site although it has some shapefiles created from the data. I've worked with about 2/3 of the US at once merged into one shapefile... but this was very large and hard to work with. I wonder if loading a shapefile of data for the entire world would even be feasible on most machines?